My Life As A Hobby

  When I first get out of bed, I do what I always do - go over my pain checklist. Lower back - stiff. Right hip - ouch. Right elbow - check. Right shoulder - owww.  Left foot - ohh. Neck - yep. It’s just another typical morning. I’m moving slower than the Tin Man before Dorothy oils his joints. I could write a country song about waking up and call it “Another Three Motrin Morning.” And I get no sympathy from my 81 year-old brother. When I complain about my maladies, he just laughs and said,” Just wait.” At my last check up I told my doctor that the warranty on this body has expired. I know pains are just a natural by-product of the aging process, but it’s hard to understand. In my younger days, only lots of exercise would make me sore. I knew that a hard workout at the gym was sure to make me stiff the next day. Now, every morning, every single morning, I wake up sore. Apparently sleeping seven hours was too much exertion for me. What’s worse, more times than not,...

  By now, I’m sure most of you have your Christmas tree and home decorations up. Not me - I’m a world class procrastinator. Think I’m kidding? I still have a rotten Jack O’Lantern on my front porch. Of course, soon I will be forced to give in to my wife’s persistent requests (aka nagging), and begin hauling up boxes from the basement to make our house a quaint holiday home - for about 3 weeks when it all goes back in the boxes again.  At the risk of sounding like Scrooge, all of this fuss putting out holiday decorations for a few weeks ranks right up there with prepping for a colonoscopy.  The first box I retrieve is the biggest and the worst - the dreaded Christmas tree. Ours comes in several parts which must be fit together just so in order for the lights to work. Then the limbs must be bent out in such a way to avoid “gaps” - the high crime of Christmas tree  assembly. Finally, it must be ramrod straight and sturdy, so I end up using books as levelers until ...

  We just got a new oven - one of those sleek, stainless steel jobs.  Just looking at it’s simple lines, you get the impression that it would be a snap to operate. And you would be wrong. The only way to effectively work this device is to have a doctorate in engineering and a bottle of Valium.  It has an instruction manual that’s 68 pages long.  I don’t think the instruction manual for a Stealth Bomber has that many pages.   Aside from all the technical hooey, the manual has some very important advice all new appliance owners need to know - things like, don’t use the oven door as a seat, and wear proper clothing while operating the oven. Honestly, I don’t know what proper cooking clothes are. I just know you shouldn’t fry bacon naked.  Here’s another biggie: the manufacturer implores us not to heat up corrosive chemicals on the cooktop. That’s certainly disappointing news for all those folks who like to warm up their hydrochloric acid.  But ...

  “ Heaven goes by favor. If it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in.”                               Mark Twain I read where author Rick Bragg’s just lost his dog Speck.  If you’ve read his best selling book, The Speckled Beauty , I think you will understand his feeling of loss. I sure do. Once I read the article, I put down the phone and cried.  It’s because I know how he badly he hurts - I’ve hurt the same way. It’s also because I’m an unashamed dog person. I prefer canines to most people. One of the first things I plan to ask Jesus is why He gave dogs such a short life span.  It seems like everybody has one dog in their life that is different from all the others. Rick’s was a stray named Speck and mine was a rescue named Precious. The events of my life and her reaction to them bonded us together tightly. Our emotional connection transcended dog and man. Le...

  When I’m seeing a new doctor for the first time, which is occurring with increasing frequency nowadays, during the initial Q&A they always ask me if I smoke. And I always answer,”Not unless I’m on fire.”   Even though that’s a response you would expect from a certified smart alec like myself, it’s the truth.  However, if you were to press me further, I would admit that for a  period of time I was a smoker - even if it it was between the ages of 11 and 13.  Dennis, one of my running buddies at the time, decided that to be cool, we should be smoking. Of course, I had already been puffing on candy cigarettes for a several years, so this was an easy transition. And back in the mid sixties, real smokes were about as easy to get as the candy ones. Here how it worked: we walked into the lobby of a nearby cheap motel, put two quarters in a machine, used both hands to pull a lever, and walked out with a pack of Marlboros, or Winstons, or Lucky Strikes, or w...

It seems that I spend about half of my time on the computer deleting spam. Clearing spam is a lot like shaving. If you don’t do it every day, you are going to be overcome with a growth that is much more difficult to deal with.  I’ve noticed that as I’ve aged, the spam I get has changed. Several years ago, every piece of junk e mail I received seemed to be about a new miracle product for hair loss. Then a few years later, I was besieged with offers for cheap Viagra from Canada. Fast forward to today, and a lot of the spam is from some nice people who want to help me with my final burial expenses. Spam has always been with us in one form or another. If you read comic books like I did when I was a kid, you were exposed to a version of it. Back then, comics had pages of ads hawking all kind of ridiculous products. This was spam from another era. As I thought about this, curiosity got the best of me and I pulled a 60 year old Spider Man comic out of my closet, and begin flipping t...